Tire Shrinker to Dragster Page: Front Inside
vi, 248 p. : ill., ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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READERS will find here the variety and
richness that they have come to expect
in the annual volume of the Texas
Folklore Society. It is a far cry from the
day when the iron tires of buggies and
wagons had to be shrunk by a black-
smith to the day when monsterlike cars,
propelled by gasoline with added nitor-
methane-and driven by weird-looking
young men, hurtle from zero to two
hundred miles an hour over the quarter-
mile drag strip. Ernest Rissman faith-
fully explains how his father used to
shrink tires on Bear Creek, and Hermes
Nye--not a dragster but a lawyer-
takes us into the world of drag racing
with its special mores and colorful
lingo. It is good to look back on old
times, but folklore is not by any means
confined to what is rural or antique.
People still yearn to uncover buried
or sunken treasure, but today they are
likely to use mechanical diggers and
pumps instead of picks and shovels, as
James Day indicates in his article.
Though Tom Mix acted in front of a
camera and did all kinds of stunts,
Mody Boatright shows that he thought
of himself as participating in a kind of
morality play. James Lee makes the
point in his article that the people who
buy and bury themselves in a typical
man's adventure magazine are also the
folk, however they may be misusing the
gift of literacy.
Frontier preachers, Bill Fowler tells
us, made use of both hell fire and humor
in their sermons. They were sometimes
ridiculed by journalists, but they could
laugh at themselves too.
Before the screwworm was all but
eradicated by releasing sterilized males
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Tire Shrinker to Dragster (Book)
Collection of Texas, Jamaican and Irish folklore, including stories about drag racing, treasure hunting, frontier preachers, Irish storytellers, mock bidding in Jamaica, and more. The index begins on page 247.
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Hudson, Wilson M. Tire Shrinker to Dragster, book, 1968; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc38875/m1/2/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Press.